The mania of the Castillos

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Monthly Archives: April 2007

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I haven’t been writing much since I returned from Thailand, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy. In the last month & a half, I’ve gotten 3 part-time jobs. My first job is to teach English twice a week for a local community college. That started 2 weeks ago. My second job is to score essays for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Today was my first day. This is a work-at-home job, but I have scheduled hours when I have to be online scoring essays. My TOEFL job is highly secretive, so I can’t write much about it. The only thing I’ll say is that it takes a lot of concentration and it makes my brain hurt a little. I’m hoping it will be easier tomorrow.

In case you’re wondering about job #3, it’s a job correlating educational materials to state educational standards for a small company in Phoenix. I think it will be interesting work. I’m excited to start; I just haven’t been given any assignments yet.

Of all of our wedding-related appointments, I’ve been most excited about the one with the wedding-cake shop. We called the bakery as soon as I came back from Thailand, but they didn’t have any appointments available for six weeks! The wait was long, but we finally got to go eat some great cake.

We weren’t sure how cake tastings worked. I was hoping we’d get to try every flavor of cake and filling, but that’s not what happened. Instead, they brought us a small round cake with their two most popular flavors in it: white cake with vanilla Bavarian cream & strawberries and chocolate with dark chocolate mousse. We liked both kinds, so we ordered both! Our 3-layer cake will have 2 layers of the white cake with Bavarian cream & strawberries. The other layer will be chocolate with dark chocolate mousse and raspberries. Yum!

The best part of the cake tasting was that they let us take the rest of our small tasting cake home with us! Dave took some of it in to work, and the rest of it is sitting on the counter waiting to be devoured.

For those of you who hadn’t heard yet, I spent a relaxing long weekend in the backwoods of Missouri along the Mississippi. Actually, for anybody who’s spent any length of time between the Rockies and Appalachians, I’m sure it wasn’t backwoods at all…I, however, am used to an entirely different mode of life. That’s not to say that I was was bored out of my mind (I wasn’t) or that I didn’t enjoy myself greatly (I did). It’s simply to say that I’ve never seen a river as large as the Mississippi or been to a town that sat on the banks of it so unassumingly as La Grange. I’m told that in its heyday, La Grange rivaled St Louis in size and grandeur. Sadly, time hasn’t been especially kind to La Grange. Much like the towns that were stranded along the old Route 66 when I-40 was built, La Grange was bypassed by a highway built on its western edge. With the disappearance of traffic, the town has been slowly drying up.

Well…drying up is an unfortunate term. Among the heaviest blows in recent years would be the floods that occurred in 1993. As you might recall, the Mississippi burst its banks and flooded the entire valley. This is an event that occurs every couple of years in La Grange, but this year was special. It ended up causing so much damage and devastation that many riverside businesses and homes were abandoned. I’m told that year by year, the old abandoned buildings are torn down and replaced with empty foundations.

A somewhat amusing addition to the town of La Grange is Terrible’s Casino. According to Missouri state law, the only gambling allowed is on water-borne along the Mississippi (Missouri as well?). The folks of Terribles hatched a clever plan, however. Digging out a trench, they effectively added a spur to the Mississippi and built the casino on a floating foundation. Apparently this circumvented the letter of the law enough and Terribles was allowed to remain.

Prior to our trip, Emily and I purchased the audio rendition of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson (highly recommended). It served as a memoir for a childhood spent growing up in Des Moines, Iowa. The stories had a sad, sweet, reminiscent (and hilarious) quality about them that perfectly mirrored the stately historicity of La Grange. We drove to and from La Grange, visited Hannibal, and trekked to Kirksville, all the while listening to the book. I kind of wonder what my experience of La Grange would have been if we had purchased a more upbeat volume to distract ourselves during all of the driving. As is was, though, I’m left with a lingering sense that La Grange is a town past its prime, sweetly recollecting days of past glory while fearing what the future would bring.

I’ll have more to say about the people we saw and the sights we visited, but for now I’m tired…and work doesn’t care how little sleep I get the night before. G’nite.